Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 11))

shouted down effectually, just as if it were a crime to be young and to
admire and study a great master, and so show his influence. But though all
are chastened by the shouting and though some are thereby infected with
the ruinous genius-bug, those who are any good still wholesomely survive
and continue to be inspired by their elders and their betters. As an average
instance of criticism, we can call to mind how a writer recently told us, in
effect, that a certain artist painted well, but with an ingenious "preconceived
determination" to see pictures in nature, instead of showing a "struggle to
express ideas associated with a rare and true vision.” The distinction is a
subtle one, and requires something of a transcendentalist to make it. It is upon
a plane where we must be extra careful not to be confused by catchwords, for
idealities and spiritualisms add their batteries to the studio critical patter,
which is quite misleading enough for rapid writers, as well as readers, with-
out such mystical additions. However, it should in fairness be added that
many current formularies of ephemeral criticism are a growth of the endeavor
to criticize by indirections, and so to avoid throwing stones that can hurt
other glass-house dwellers materially.
To the fakers who look outside for their ideas, it has become a serious
question as to what they may take undetected and uncontemned. But to
the artist who looks within and holds up the mirror of his heart, there
comes no such problem. His serious question is: will what I see, as best I
can render it, be understood and valued by others ? All that exists, including
all that has gone before, is his—if he can make it vitally and truly of him-
self; for he never was before and what is really his will be a new note struck
in art. That is the meaning of the "personality" of to-day: it is not the
eccentricity of effort; it is not the egoism of the prescientific romanticist;
though a true individuality, it works by more scientific methods than of old,
and is replete with the poise of uncommon common-sense. Life "goes in
courage”; art "comes out power." For art is the esthetic projection of a
trained "organism which is functioning freely”—to adapt further from
John J. Chapman's essay, "Education: Froebel," in his volume entitled
"Causes and Consequences.” He enlarges, further on, thus: "We find that
in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament, style, originality,
etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote different degrees in which
some man’s brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness [i.e.
self-realization]. A deliverance of this kind has always been designated as
' creative,' no matter in what field it was found.”
A certain brilliant English writer has said that life imitates art more
than art imitates life. Paradox though this be, there is a fruitful germ of
truth in it. It is only the crystalization into an epigram of the facts that
people are ruled by convention in art as in other things, but that for the
expression of beauty they turn to the works of those who have made the
study of beauty their especial pursuit; so that the artist sooner or later guides
and teaches, as well as do the advanced minds in other fields. But the very
artists must also be creatures of conventions and either adopt old or adapt new
ones: thus is the paradoxical circle completed. Indeed, the artists do not

27